Syrie

In Homer, the swineherd Eumaeus tells Odysseus a long autobiography about his childhood on the island of Syrie (sometimes called Ortygia), where he was the son of a king and was kidnapped by a Phoenician slave woman who carried him off to be sold into slavery. It is one of the most extended servant backstories in the poem and it gives Eumaeus’s loyalty its full weight: he was once nobility himself. Teilo cuts the whole sequence. The retelling lets Eumaeus’s loyalty stand on its own, no royal lineage required. He is just a man who has tended pigs for twenty years for a master he believes will return. The island goes. The dignity stays.